I’ve been struck today by this story on the BBC pages, which pulls together things I have been writing on the blog since I started and which has interesting implications for undergraduate education.
The Khan Academy is superb. It is close to covering universally the entire syllabi of the world’s...

There is anxiety that the UK is not producing enough PhD level researchers, particularly in science and engineering. The view of some commentators such as Brian Cox is that this puts our economy and national well-being at risk.
There is no doubt that we need experts. And there is no doubt we need cutting...

Currently my work has me thinking about future employment, the world of work and the role of universities in preparing students for this aspect of their lives.
For this blog entry, I want to put aside the issue of whether there is a conflict within universities between scholarship and preparing people for...

I work at UCL, the great university in London, directing and setting up a new degree Arts and Sciences (BASc). It’s a wonderful job, full of intellectual and practical challenge and excitement.

In the past, I studied and taught maths, physics and philosophy. I have degrees in these things. I have also studied and taught music and was a professional opera singer for a while, having trained at the National Opera Studio in the UK, where I was the Royal Opera House scholar. These days I increasingly teach on interdisciplinarity (as a concept, but also the practicalities of implementation), history of ideas (especially of the disciplines) and expertise.

Currently, I mostly read on interdisciplinarity and the philosophy of education, but I'm interested in everything which touches education - which is pretty much everything! For example, I'm interested in the future of work and its relation to education, politics, economics, artificial intelligence and so on. In a former period, when I was heavily involved in music, there was a longish period when I was interested in religion, particularly mysticism, and I read widely in this area. I published a paper on the connections of mysticism and music called ‘Expressions of Inexpressible Truths’ which was reprinted in a twenty-year commemorative edition of the World of Music.

I may publish more formally on different things, related to my work and further interests, in the coming years - though my main focus is very much on developing the Arts and Sciences degree. My feeling is that we are at the beginning of substantial changes in academia and in our relation to knowledge in general (these sorts of things I write about on the blog) and I am interested to question my relationship to learning, teaching, writing and reading as part of these shifts. In any event, it is a positive development that where one used to be chided for being ‘a perpetual student’, one is now lauded as ‘a lifelong learner’ and admired as showing flexibility, adaptability and an intuitive ability to negotiate the ever-changing modern age.

I think people can change enormously over their lifetimes: emotionally, politically, artistically, intellectually, and the rest.

At some point – and up to now – these have been some of the thinkers and doers that have shaped my life in some way. The following are listed by category and in rough chronological order, according to when I encountered them.

I am currently using this blog to focus on issues in education, interdisciplinarity and economics. Below is some more personal stuff and some other stuff which I am happy to share with those who are interested